I've come to think that really the problem was with me ... I just didn't understand the cultural background and the significance of the things that happened in these stories. It's rather similar to how I felt about Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.... I had no appreciation of them, and their background and meaning, until I read Terry Jones's amazing book Chaucer's Knight.... it's hard to explain why it was so brilliant in a short way, but basically it's like a detective story, but investigating who the Knight was in the 1300's and what the listeners would think about him!. Definitely a "desert island discs" book.
Anyhow, I thought I would be more motivated to reread these stories if I read them in Welsh ... and as a starter book I got this ... Straeon o'r Mabinogi .... to give you an idea of the level of difficulty, I can more or less read the stories with minimal dictionary input!
So that's what I'm doing... along with all the other things I'm doing.
There's lots of other translations , there's versions in modernised Welsh, and there's versions in the original Welsh , and then there are "re-tellings " ..... see the video at the end .